Watergate + Guns + Murder = ( Fast + Furious )

Remember Watergate? I sure do. I was 14 years old during the Summer of 73, when the hearings were on TV and in the news every single day. It was a very, very big deal. I also remember the way the press acted like sharks with blood in the water. They hated Nixon, and in a convenient twist, under the guise of “doing their jobs” they could also take down a president. Win/win. Of course, that resulted in Gerald Ford becoming president, so the upside is not totally clear.

Today, instead, they look at a scandal called “Fast and Furious”, about our own governmental agencies like ATF and DOJ running guns for Mexican drug gangs, a scandal that has led to hundreds of deaths in Mexico and at least one U.S. Border Patrol agent, a scandal that is clearly more dangerous and widespread than the narrow political targeting of Watergate, and say, “eh, who cares?”.

So while I generally avoid politics on this site, sometimes I become so filled with disbelief and frustration at the sheer scale of the thuggish behavior from our government today, and the brazen and wanton disregard for the rule of law and the principles of our nation’s founding, that I have to write about it. As I wrote in a comment to a Dustbury post the other day about political blogging: “I found that analyzing and critiquing politics requires a degree of cynicism that I don’t care to stew myself in voluntarily. But I’m damn glad that others do.”

There are now 52 Congressmen publicly calling for Holder’s resignation. 52 is just shy of 1/8 of the 435 members of the U.S. House. Now, when 1/8 of the entire House is convinced that the Attorney General of the United States, the top law enforcement official in the entire country, must step down, and further when they are so convinced of this that they publicly demand it, this is not just the usual political gamesmanship. This is pretty serious business.

Accordingly, you might think the mainstream media would start to realize this is a story, at some point, and start covering it, and you know, stop acting like Obama’s PR agency. But you’d be completely and utterly wrong (except for CBS News, and even they are not pushing it). Only the “conservative” side of the news spectrum cares about this story at all, which actually tells us more about those who choose not to cover it than about those who do: when the evidence clearly implicates not just the Attorney General but others inside the White House, possibly up to and including a sitting president, making all of them complicit in the most reckless and wanton disregard of the rule of law imaginable, and yet the majority of the news business sees that as a yawner, this tells us many important things, none of them good.

I’m not sure who the hell these people think they are fooling, but I suppose in some backhanded way I should thank them for treating me like an idiot who doesn’t realize that he has choices today on consuming news product. So thanks for clearing that up, douchebags.

And forgive me for concluding that the degree of partisanship displayed by today’s media is not just unbelievably revolting, it is an affront to everything that the First Amendment stands for. They have clearly made a choice: brazen partisanship over the most basic function of journalism, acting as a government watchdog to expose corruption and law-breaking at the highest levels.

Which means, of course, that we cannot trust a single thing they tell us about politics.